Meet the Fab Five

In recruiting for six Vermont furniture sales and marketing positions this year, we reviewed over 400 resumes and interviewed dozens of excellent candidates. It’s been a challenging task to find the combination of skills and talent needed to run our online fine furniture gallery. So we feel extremely fortunate to have been able to hire the following superstars for our team: Heather Gantt, Loryn Dion, Heather Barrett, Liz Francese and Sean Henry.

The Fab Five have been quite gracious about providing photos for Diane Sawyer’s ABC World News, Made in America series. This picture was taken after a long, strenuous day of photo shooting… can you tell?

Made in America Holiday Shopping in Brattleboro, Vermont

This photo was taken last week when we tasked the freshmen with providing photographic inspiration at the request of Diane Sawyer and the ABC World News crew. If you followed our activities at this time last year, you’ll remember that national news team spent a day filming our Made in America Holiday Shopping Challenge at our office and all around Vernon, Vermont. This year they were curious about our progress and wanted to learn about any new people we had hired to help grow this American made furniture business.

The Fab Five were most gracious in accommodating ABC’s request for photos and videos so I thought I’d share a few of them here on the blog.

The Fab Five shopping for American made gifts in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont. Notice Sean is carrying everyone’s shopping bags in that photo on the right? What’s up with that, girls?

Visit our Facebook to see more photos and our picks for 2012’s best Made in America Christmas gifts.

Heather Barrett (left) and Loryn Dion, the women behind Vermont’s Green Furniture Blog are showing off their Secret Santa gifts, received at our Made in America Christmas Party. Heather has a Tervis tumbler and a Kringle candle. Loryn has a set of handmade ceramic coasters designed and created by Heather.

Who Writes Vermont’s Green Furniture Blog?

There’s a lot of creative energy at Vermont Woods Studios these days and happily we have a number of talented writers who are willing to share our daily goings on through this green furniture blog. Pictured above are Heather Barrett (left) of Brattleboro VT and Loryn Dion (right) of Northfield MA who work long and hard on many aspects of our Vermont furniture store, including keeping you up to date on the latest office shenanigans.

Holiday Hot Topic: Made in America Christmas Shopping Challenge

The photo above was taken Friday at our “Made in America” Secret Santa party where each of us gave and received American made Christmas gifts. It’s part of our Made in America Holiday Shopping Challenge (we figure with Americans spending about $586 Billion this holiday season, if all of those gifts were made in America it could generate 5.8 million jobs. OK we know that not every gift can or should be made in America, but still shopping “American made” can create a lot of jobs).

Not Just Red, White and Blue– Green Too!

Anyway, if you want to follow these two creative writers you’ll find their contributions right here every week. Besides keeping us up to date on American made Christmas gift ideas, Heather tends to blog about green furniture, Vermont Travel and all things adventurous and exciting in the Green Mountain state. Loryn’s been keeping her focus on Green decor and interior design but you never know what kind of provocative topics she might wander off into.

To stay in touch with Heather and Loryn, subscribe to this blog on the top right or join their conversations on Facebook. And keep a look out for insider secrets from their newly recruited accomplice, Liz Francese who’ll be taking you on occasional trips behind the veil at Vermont Woods Studios Sales and Customer Service. More about Liz coming soon!

At last, ABC World News with Diane Sawyer ran the segment on our "Made in America" Holiday Shopping Challenge yesterday. YAY! Here is the link toview it online. We'd like to thank ABC producers Christine Brozyna and Eric Noll for coming to Vernon to film the segment. Theirs' is not an easy job.

When Christine and Eric came to Vermont last month it was because they had read a blog about our "Made in America" project way back in September. They were impressed that such a small company would take on a project about creating American jobs and they wanted to put the size and strength of ABC behind it.

Well, a lot of time has passed since then and I'm sure that as each new idea came into the newsroom, our story morphed depending on the context of the day. There were a couple times we were considered for inclusion in earlier segments but for whatever reason they fell through. In the end we were pretty disappointed to see that our segment really wasn't about the jobs or the furniture being created by small independent companies like Vermont Woods Studios or Woodruff Custom Furniture.

Instead we got spun into a segment on American schools. Go figure. But it was indeed an educational experience, learning how news stories get created (I'll be much more wary now, about believing what I see in the news). We're trying to just be grateful for the fact that ABC has been able to raise awareness (much more than we ever could) all across the country about the jobs that can be created by buying American made holiday gifts.

Thank you so much for attending our Made in America Holiday Shopping Challenge! Today (I think it's because of your support) we got a phone call from ABC World News telling us they are sending a camera crew up to Vernon, Vermont on Tuesday to film some footage for their November 30 nightly news show.

They want to learn more about our pledge to buy American made holiday gifts at Vermont Woods Studios Fine Furniture and also tour around the town of Vernon. They'll visit all the BIG attractions in town: the elementary school, the town hall, the general store, the fire station, a farm or two and Chad Woodruff's custom furniture workshop. What could be more cool for the evening news than that? They'll be interviewing people along the way and asking them about any plans they might have to "buy American" this holiday season.

So we're pretty excited about this and we're grateful to you for all your support, as always. By the way, what are you buying for Christmas this year? If you haven't taken the challenge yet, it's not too late. We figured that if everybody in the country bought everything "American made" over the holidays, it could generate almost 5 million jobs! Who needs politicians, right?

For local Vernon and Brattleboro area residents– if you'd like to be on TV or just see the camera crew in action, you can keep up with their schedule as it evolves by joining this Facebook group or checking our website. Here's a clip of a similar segment in the ABC series. People in the crowd scene at the Vernon Town Hall will all have a chance to be interviewed and present visuals to feature on the national show.